Vox Importer

January 27, 2010

Brian

Thinking of moving your blog from Vox.com to WordPress.com? You are not alone.

We’ve noticed that several people are dissatisfied with the service and want to move their blog elsewhere. A lot of people that we’ve heard from say they didn’t realize that there is no way to export from Vox and are looking for a solution.

Vox users have at least one option now: create a free blog here at WordPress.com, then import your Vox blog. (And never be locked in again — we make your data as free as possible.)

Update: You can now apply a password to all posts that will be imported from Vox.

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I moved onto your platform after getting tired of the hassles of hosting it myself and putting up with hackers. (who so graciously crashed a blog that I had been writing for 5 years and because of strange circumstances, this time was not able to restore).
I think there would be only one other reason that people move off this platform that I can think of, having done both self-hosting and hosted by you.

The inability to embed videos besides Youtube makes it kind of a pain (not a total loss but still would like to be able to to do that).
This, of course, comes from the inability to run scripts. I think the only other reason is that we cannot choose our own themes that we’ve either purchased or designed ourselves.

I understand that hosting it on your servers comes with some limitations, but I am a paid subscriber and would love to be able to do these things with something like a premium subscription.
Right now, I have the ad-free choice.

Just an idea. Have a free service that doesn’t allow the other stuff. Have a premium that is just like hosting it yourself but without the headaches. And have some nice plug-ins with it, to boot.

Ok, I could seriously CRY right now. I have been bugging Vox for over a year to make an export. Not so I could leave, but so I could print my blog in book form. But I finally ditched them on January 1 cuz I’d just had it! But WOOHOO, now I can import that over and be a two WordPress Blog home! 🙂

This post brought tears to my eyes. At last my old Vox posts are really mine again. I was leaving that account open for just such a day as this. Thank-you, thank-you, thank-you. Or as the Count would say, 10-Q, 10-Q, 10-Q!

awesome. i’ve been wondering what to do about my old “archive” on Vox that wouldn’t involve me sitting down and manually backing the whole two or three years I was there up on a hard drive somewhere. thanks, WP.

OK… I can see this as a solution for people who wish to have *public* blogs, but a lot of Vox users (like me) prefer to limit content.

Vox has a lot of things that you don’t…. including adjustable privacy controls for every item that’s either posted by a Vox user/uploaded by them/linked to or embedded by them.

I don’t see anything comparable on this platform.

No hard feelings – I think this service is great for those who wish to blog! But the social networking aspects of Vox aren’t here, or perhaps I should say that they’re here in a fairly rudimentary form. Your service wasn’t built for that.

So what might you be able to do in order to make moving from Vox a bit more attractive?

@e2tc for me its not about the features. Yeah, Vox is more of a “social” platform with more fine-grained privacy controls. (As a result it’s also a lot harder to understand and learn how to use.) The point of WordPress’ Vox import is simple: it exists. And by existing, it frees one’s Vox data. Vox, I learned much to my chagrin – and far too late into my time with that service – traps one’s data in its system as a result of its lack of export capability. That’s just plain bad, no matter the variety or quality of features the service offers. So, yeah, Vox has a great feature set, but you give up a heck of a lot of personal freedom to use it.

I worked for Six Apart (the people who make Vox) for a long time, so I’m not entirely unbiased on this topic, but I thought I’d give it a try.

Without a choice to create a new blog from the importer, I actually imported all of my friends, family, and neighborhood-only (protected) posts into and over top of a blog I’d used to coordinate efforts for a friend’s funeral. *wince*

Because of the nature of Vox and the importance of friends-and-family only posts, it’d be a better import experience if there was the option to create a new blog at the start, and if that blog was set to not be searchable/public. Just my two cents. 🙂

I too have a vox account, been with them for three years, and whilst ive imported my blog here and do find many items that I really really like about WordPress, I cannot myself free myself completely from Vox. Basically their social neighbourhood system is wonderful and my neighbourhood I have built up over the years prevents me from cutting ties with Vox completely. If wordpress had more of a community feel id move lock stock and barrel in a flash.

I didn’t know anything about Vox until a blogger named Joanna Bracket marten (spelling?) plagiarized a long post of mine from WordPress without naming me or the original site — or, of course, asking if it was OK. So now I know Vox, only from that one unpleasant experience, and that behavior makes me fume. At least ask!

I’m a huge Vox fan but the non-export issue has been a big frustration for me for years. THANK YOU for this!!! I’m trying this now… it’s frozen on 10 posts so I’m not hopeful it’s going to work for me tonight… but the fact that this option is available is so fantastic 🙂 THANK YOU!!!

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU! I’ve been so frustrated not being able to back up my blog. I love the Vox community but the trapped feeling is never a good thing. Thank you so much for finally doing this!

This is wonderful! I am a VOX implant to WordPress, mainly because of their lack of guest commenting. I had a friend that somehow configured a way to import my posts into WP. It did not transfer all my VOX items, but it did transfer many. Some were cut to abbreviated versions upon import. So, do you have any idea if/how this would work for me, being that a portion of my old VOX posts cam over but not all? Would it double import old posts?

Most likely it would duplicate the posts if you ran the importer now.
Our Vox importer keeps track of what it has imported. It wouldn’t be able to differentiate the posts you imported manually vs. posts that you created in WordPress.
If you have not created any new content since your import, I can dump your blog’s content and re-import.

My only gripe with WordPress.com is there just isn’t enough themes to choose from. Some are too wide, others too narrow. I just wish that you guys would consider allowing us to use others templates like Blogger does. There are loads and loads to choose from on there!
Apart from that WordPress is great.